Judith Rowbotham: When Nottingham grappled with child labour

LAST month, the Post reported that around 1,400 primary school children in Nottingham are "persistently absent" – which means they have missed 15 per cent or more of classes.

This may seem a substantial figure – and indeed is higher than the national average – but it pales into insignificance compared to the problems of pupil absence that Nottingham newspapers were concerned about exactly 100 years ago.

In March 1914, a meeting in London of the New Constitutional Society for Women's Suffrage had reported on the issue of child employment nationally, as part of its campaign to show how valuable women's contributions to the life of the nation would be.

That report highlighted Nottingham as one of the worst locations in the country for the use of children in "sweated labour" – work for long hours at low pay in poor working conditions – because they were used by mothers who were home-workers in the lace trade.

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While the majority of the lace was, by this time, machine-made in the city's factories, women home-workers were used for the finishing process, which involved tasks such as drawing out the long, loose threads left by the machine process.

Even the very youngest, it seems, could be employed to do that sort of task – it was little work for little hands to do.

But by the time you were five, and had a little more dexterity than a child of three or four, you could be more useful, so mothers regularly kept their children home from school to help.

Even if they attended, they had to rush home at dinner times and work, instead of eating. They would munch a piece of bread on the way back to school for the afternoon and return to work at the end of the school day.

The press, both national and local, picked up on the research and indignantly described the use of children as sweated labour in this way as being "discreditable to a civilised community".

It was not unique to Nottingham (Birmingham and the East End of London were other notorious locations for this problem) but the scale of this problem locally was considerable, with estimates of 10,000 women in Nottingham involved.

The evidence given to the 1907 Select Committee on Home Working by Miss Rose Squire, the senior lady factory inspector, on the use of home-based child labour, was that it was "very prevalent" in Nottingham.

Local investigations over the winter of 1913-14 into truancy and child employment showed that at least 1,200 children were returned as being involved, and this was almost certainly the tip of the iceberg.

One unnamed headmaster complained that 30 per cent of his pupils were employed in home working out of hours – and this, of course, was simply that which was recorded and did not take into account those who were absent regularly to do such work during the day.

Interestingly, the women investigators, including Rose Squire, did not blame the mothers. They insisted that "only the pressure of the direst poverty" would drive a mother to employ their children.

The reality was that the employers did not pay well enough and the local authority had not taken decisive actions.

According to The Times of March 23, 1914, the use of child labour in the city was so familiar that for far too long it had "scarcely excited" local attention.

But things were beginning to change that spring. Warnings to employers and prosecutions of parents (with fines handed down in the magistrates' courts) were supposedly having an effect, with the consequence of fewer children at work and more in school. So the numbers of children involved in home working were confidently expected to fall in Nottingham.

Mind you, on March 11, the failure of one leading lace manufacturer, Messrs Pratt, Harst and Co was announced in The Times, suggesting the decline in the viability of Nottingham's lace industry – so often put down to the effects of the coming war – actually predated it. That may also have been a reason for the confidence being shown back in March 1914 that the numbers of children working in lace finishing would decline.